A journey of a pragmatic software developer.

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Monthly Archives: April 2012

I was converting some pdf files to epub with Calibre when I discovered an old entry of Michael Fogus. Back in 2007 he wrote on his blog about books he have read. It was more a kind of a dairy what he had read in this year. This led me to the following question: Is it worth to write a book journal? And the second question: What kind of format could this be? And last what information is it worth to collect?

Let me answer the second question first. In my opinion this could be a simple page in a journal which states in a chronological manner what I have read. Why a journal and not a fancy program? I believe sometimes you can only win if you have the ability to write something in a easy way with colors, mindmaps, different drawings. This work is much easier with pen and paper than with electronic stuff.

The third question what should noted. For me the answer is:

the author

how do I like this book

a kind of classification

the duration for reading

The reason for this introduction? I made a sticky note to myself ‘Note the books read’. At this time I was very busy and days became weeks and weeks became months and I started to go through my old notes again and found this sticky note. I needed almost a week to get out what I intended to do. In the meantime I started my book journal. My experience so far? Not really much. But this is only the beginning. I have some long time reading books. One of them is ‘How to read a book’ from Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Why is this a long time reading book? If I will take full advantages of this book I will read as mentioned in the book. Many reading techniques will be uncovered, e.g. pigeon holing, X-raying a book, coming to terms with the author, and many more. The whole fourth part of this book is about syntopical reading. This means how are the various subjects interconnected. This is the point where I hope my journal will help me. Interconnect my reading and my knowledge.

The idea of the structured note taking with org-mode was depend on the following link The most impressive point was the structure which he uses as base for the notes. After short research I discovered that I have installed a very similar structure about 1 and 1/2 years ago. The bad thing is I have missed to use it completely. This leads me to a small improvement step: Use my structure and export all the needed information with c-c c-e h Simple expressed: this leads to an export as a html file. The next logical step for me was the creation of a Master.org page. On this page all my pages where linked together. What is missing now is a link or menu on every page. So that I can switch to other pages as I need them. Fun isn’t it?

Some days later I had do rename my Master.org. The reason are very simple. Most start pages which are viewed through a web browser are called index.htm. So this is more a common way to name this proper.

I’m a EMACS user since several years. And still there are features to (re)discover. Today I looked for a easy method to switch between frames. The obvious way is to use C-x 5 o. This is basically the same as C-x o to switch between windows.

In this stackoverflow questions is a package called framemove.el mentioned. If you install this you got as default key-bindings shift and arrow or meta and arrow to move between frames. I don’t think that this are very good bindings because shift and arrow is a way to mark some text and meta and arrow is to move a whole word at one time. I thing many windows user are trained to use this shortcuts on a daily base. I’m aware, that the same functionality in EMACS is bound to meta-fmeta-b for movements between words and c-f and c-b to move for one character. But some muscle memory won’t be erased in a easy way

My very first blog post 🙂 I’m not sure what I will say in this blog. Not yet. I think it will get a documentation on my journey as a pragmatic software developer. With some hints about how I will use Emacs as my editor of choice, about books I have read and will read, about agile themes. And so on. For the moment I don’t know exactly where my journey will lend me. But as said Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings:

Since I’m a little bit lazy and I really prefer Emacs as text editor I was looking for an easy solution to publish my blog entries out of Emacs. My entry to search for a solution was the blog of Sacha Chua. She uses EMACS as well and had done some improvements in the directions of simplify the workflow with org-mode. In an old blog entry I found the solution to my needs.

The next step was the installation of org2blog and xml-rpc since this two tools are needed to get the automatism to work.